We wish to establish in this section that at the time of dictating the notes on Uber Wahrheit und Luge Nietzsche had yet to overcome the following limitations on his radical critique of Christian-bourgeois society that will later be explicated much more powerfully in the 'Genealogie' and in the 'Gaya Scienza'. First, Nietzsche relies still on the Platonic chorismos or 'separation' of "subjective perception" and "objective reality", not so much in terms of the existence of "ideas" or, as he calls them, "primal forms", but certainly in relation to the existence of a "real world" of ob-jects separate from human perception. Secondly, he relies on the "anthropomorphism" of scientific concepts to illustrate and prove their one-sidedness, rather than elaborate an implicit critique of scientific practice in the context of antagonistic societies. Third, he relies on "habituation" and "convention" as the causes and origins of scientific practice and its ante litteram Weberian "disenchantment and rationalisation of the world". Finally, despite his emphasis on "the ontogeny of thought" and the physiological role of human instincts in its evolution from instincts of freedom to the self-dissolution of Christian-bourgeois society and its transcendental metaphysical tradition, Nietzsche failed to historicise these instincts because of his emphasis on onto-genetic factors rather than rely (as Hegel and Marx did) on phylo-genetic ones.

Notice one important thing: -
and that is that Nietzsche is still referring to “nature” as “an X to us inaccessible and indefinable”.
Similarly, earlier he equivocated on the fact that concepts seek to make
“equal” what are “altogether unequal
experiences”. And he also referred to
“man” as an “artistically creative Subject”.
But all this suggests that in his mind “nature” is still some kind of “ob-ject”
that ec-sists in op-position to (Gegen-stand)
human beings even though this ob-ject, is “in-accessible and in-definable to us”!
This suspicion about Nietzsche’s mistaken formulation and understanding of the
problem of perception is confirmed in the following quotation:

If he were able
to get out of the prison

walls of this
faith, even for an instant only, his "self-consciousness"

would be
destroyed at once. Already

it costs him
some trouble to admit to himself that the

insect and the
bird perceive a world different from his

own, and that the question, which of the two world
perceptions is more accurate, is quite a senseless one, since to decide this
question it would be necessary

to apply the standard of right perception, i.e., to apply

a standard which does
not exist.On
the whole it

seems to me that the "right perception"—which

would mean the adequate expression of an object in

the subject—is a nonentity full of contradictions:

for between two utterly different spheres, as between

subject and object, there is no causality, no
accuracy,

no expression, but at the utmost an aesthetical relation,

I mean a suggestive metamorphosis [Ubertragung], a stammering

translation [Ubersetzung] into quite a distinct foreign language, for

which purpose however there is needed at any rate

an intermediate
sphere, an intermediate force, freely

composing and freely inventing.The word
"phenomenon" [Erscheinung]

contains many seductions, and on that

account I avoid it as much as possible, for it is not

true that it is the essence of things that [only,
merely – blosse] appears in the empiric

Again here Nietzsche is still
torn between the “arti-ficiality” of scientific metaphors that pretend to
discover “the real perception”, on one side, and on the other side the
“genuineness” of intuitive perceptions whose im-mediacy reminds us of their
contingency or lack of “necessity”, of “truth”. Thus, it is not “the essence of
things” that “appears” in the empirical world”, but simply a set of
“appearances” that can never penetrate and embody (through mimesis or
imitation) that “X inaccessible and undefinable to us”. Yet the fact that this
“X” is taken by Nietzsche to ec-sist as “nature” and that for him there is a
need for “an intermediate sphere, an intermediate force” for its
“translation” or “metamorphosis” into meta-phors – this fact alone is
conclusive evidence that the philosopher of Rocken has not at this early stage
abandoned completely the chorismos or
schism of reality into “re-ality” or “thing-in-itself” independent and opposed
to “phenomena” or “mere appearances”
– a schism that has characterized Western philosophy from Plato to mediaeval
Scholasticism and Neoplatonism through to Kant and German Classical Idealism as
well as Neo-Kantism and beyond. [Note from Cassirer on Cusano – methexis.]

Despite this equivocation, Nietzsche
rightly observes here that immediate perception (Art and myth-making) and
conceptual reflection (logico-mathematics and science) differ only as activities, with the latter clearly
associated with the “intellect” (Verstand)
and the former with “intuition” (Anschauung),
but not in their “origin and development” (Ursprung,
Entstehung, Entwicklung) which cannot be distinguished in an ontological or
anthropological sense. And it is clearly the mnemonic faculty, the human
ability to remember experiences and therefore to conceptualise them
meta-phorically by “holding on” to them, by re-flecting
on them and subjecting them to ana-lysis (retrospective dissection, separation)
– it is this “memory” that allows humans to set up an artificial “anti-thesis”
between the “individual and real” experiences or “phenomena” or “appearances” (Ent-scheidungen), on one side, and the “conceptual
categories and forms” that abstract from those experiences and “form-alise”
them in such a way that “the unequal becomes equal” and the human practical search for the “certainty” of
the outcomes of actions becomes confused with the ec-sistence of “truth” and
“the essence of things” and “re-ality”. Nietzsche will tackle the provenance of
this “search for certainty” soon, but we will leave the discussion of this until
later.

Memory or the “duration”
(Bergson) or “intentionality” (Husserl) of a thought is what Nietzsche
identifies as the ontogeny of thought that leads from the instincts (Triebe), through “self-consciousness” -
that is to say, the ability of humans to delude themselves that their thoughts
can “adequately re-present or mimic” their contents in the unity of an
individual ego or self -, to what he calls “the sense of Truth” (Wahrheit-sinn or Gefuhl der Wahrheit), and ultimately to “the pathos of distance” (Pathos der Distanz, in GM Ess.1, Aphs.2, 14) whereby humans
separate their lived experiences including
their mutual relations into (unreal, false) “phenomena” or “appearances” or
“lies” and “Reality” or “Truth”. It is the “lingering” of thoughts in our
memory that allows them to turn into “concepts” or “primal forms” (Plato), to
turn from intuitive perceptions into conceptual categories. And it is this
“lingering” of memory that allows humans to
forget the uniqueness of each perception and to establish regularities and predictions between
these perceptions through overarching formal abstractions or concepts. This
faculty of human memory then leads us into believing that we have a faculty of
“reason” that allows us to reflect on
experiences rationally, by means of
numerical metaphors, and to be “in-dividually conscious” of this ability,
which is then confused with the ability to penetrate “the essence of things”
and therefore “the Truth”.

Not only, then, do human beings
“forget” that their memories cannot re-produce immediate experiences
indefinitely, as if memories expressed in concepts could ever be “equal” to the
original unique experiences that are already represented metaphorically. But
also, Nietzsche is reminding us here that this is done “unconsciously”! In other words, not only can memories and concepts
never replace original experiences as if these could be repeated infinitely,
but also this “forgetting” is something that human beings do – not
“consciously” but “unconsciously”, instinctively, that is to say, without the
assistance of a mythical “self-consciousness” or “ego” or “reason” that can
adequately mimic life and the world and unite thought and its contents into an
“individual subject-object”! It is this “life of the instincts” or “drives” (Triebe, the term later borrowed by Freud
from Nietzsche to describe “the Unconscious”) that Nietzsche identifies and explores
long before Freud will turn his attention to what he will call psychoanalysis.

The aim of the early notes Uber Wahrheit und Luge (1873) written
soon after the Geburt der Tragoedie is
still simply to isolate this “sense of Truth” (Gefuhl der Wahrheit, Wahrheit-sinn),
this “instinct of truth” (Trieb der
Wahrheit). The Instinct of Truth is the earliest intimation of the future
direction of Nietzsche’s thought: it is the earliest intimation of those Instincts of Freedom that will culminate
in the concept of Will to Power. The plural Instinkte
here was certainly meant by Nietzsche to emphasize the plurality and indeterminateness of the instinctive forces that act
on the human psyche as well as their physiological
origin - and therefore to dispel the “human all-too human” delusion of
identity, conscience, mind, self-hood or indeed “transcendental ego” (Husserl).
This is the turbulent and tempestuous
Zuidersee of the human mind that is in need of exploration and bonification.

Nietzsche is already searching
for the genealogy of morals and understands early that the Apollonian/Dionysian
opposition between intellect and intuition, reason and ec-stasis, is a way for
the former to impose an artificial, “Christian-bourgeois” style of behaviour
and life on the latter by proving the “superiority” of the intellect over the
passions. Nietzsche comes to see “consciousness” or intellect as a “mask”, as a
ruse, as the beginning of that “ontogeny of thought” that will shape the
“transition” from the neutral state of the state of nature to the conventional
“values” of liberal Christian-bourgeois society and its “apparent”,
“idealistic” or utilitarian reconciliation of the system of needs, the
Economic, with the sphere of exchange and the homologation of values in the
Political – which is what makes possible the “science” of Political Economy.

The “effectuality” of this
homologation, the “possibility” of the reproduction of liberal
Christian-bourgeois civil society is what seems to confirm and validate the scientific calculation, regularity and predictability
of the symbolic exchange, of the “Truth” and the “values” of Christian-bourgeois
society – what Nietzsche calls “the
eternal rigidity, omnipresence, and infallibility of nature's laws
[Naturgesetzen]”, where “everything is
quite secure, complete, infinite, determined, and continuous” – that is,
the inter-subjectivity of its symbolic interaction - all of which boils down to
the “Value” of Political Economy, the quidditas
or “whatness”, the quantifiable and calculable hard reality that makes possible
the social synthesis. For Nietzsche,
the Political is the continuation of civil war by other [symbolic, metaphoric,
false, conventional] means. This “dissimulation” is simply a ruse to enforce a
certain “polite” life-style that serves to protect the persona of the
individual in a society that needs to keep at bay the state of nature. This
“convention” is simply a means of self-preservation and self-protection – a
“device” (cf. Heidegger’s Zustand and
Gestell, or even Foucault’s dispositif) that seeks to elevate mere
“conventions” and symbols, such as language and science, to the status of
“truth”. Truth therefore is not just a perspective but it is also a convention
that humans elevate to “the measure of all things” in an attempt to make the
world “familiar”, “manageable” and “safe”.

The question of why human
beings come to place their faith in “science and progress” is one that Nietzsche
will explore meticulously later with the concept of Will to Power. For the moment, in 1873, he can merely
describe the difficulty in frustrated “constructivist” terms, thinking that
“iteration”, sheer “long use and now-unconscious custom”, mere “persistence”,
can serve as an explanation of the mathesis. For the moment his analysis is
confined to a mere “phenomenology and perspectivism”. Nietzsche makes his
exasperation at his own inability to isolate the relevant causes evident in a
string of oft-quoted passages:

Still we do not
yet know whence the instinct of truth

[Trieb der
Wahrheit] comes… (p180)

Wir wissen immer noch
nicht, woher der Trieb zur Wahrheit stammt:

…only by all
this does he [man] live with some repose, safety and

consequence [Ruhe, Sicherheit und Konsequenz:…]. (p.184)

If he were able
to get out of the prison

walls of this
faith, even for an instant only, his "self-consciousness"

would be
destroyed at once. Already

it costs him
some trouble to admit to himself
that the

insect and the
bird perceive a world different from his

own,…(p184)

Surely every
human being who is at home with

such
contemplations has felt a deep distrust against

any idealism of
that kind, as often as he has distinctly

convinced
himself of the eternal rigidity,
omnipresence, and infallibility

of nature's laws
[Naturgesetzen]: he has arrived at the conclusion
that as far as we can penetrate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of
the microscopic world, everything is
quite secure, complete, infinite, determined, and continuous.

Science will have to dig in these shafts eternally

and successfully and all things found are sure to

have to
harmonise and notto contradict one another. (p186)

And as the man
of action binds his life to reason and its

concepts, in
order to avoid being swept away and losing

himself, so the seeker after truth builds his
hut close

to the towering
edifice of science in order to collaborate with it and

to find
protection. And he needs protection. (Beginning
of Part 2)

Clearly at this early stage,
Nietzsche is still confined within the “velleitary and arbitrary”, metaphorical
and anthropomorphic assessment of physical mathematics, of mathesis. He fails
to identify, except for his fallacious insistence on “persistence” and “crystallization
and sclerosis”, the problem of why science
and logic as specific “practices” have come about, of why they have
“triumphed”. And above all he fails to explain how they could have done so, - again, outside of sheer habit,
repetition and therefore con-vention (“persistency” [Verharren] and “crystallisation and sclerosis” [Hart- und Starr-werden])! Nietzsche is
mixing up the arbitrariness of signifiers (semeiotics) with the problem of
scientific causation – which is in
practice only regularity and predictability. He still fails to see that it is
not the “predictability” that is a “convention”, but rather the “direction of
scientific and technological practice” that responds to “antagonistic values”
being presented as “objectivity” or “necessity” or “causality” when in reality
it occurs in “conventional experimental circumstances” which supply the
problematic, all-important “nexus” between scientific concepts and "scientific reality".

2. As we saw, it
is language which has worked
originally at the

construction of
concepts; in later times it is science.
Just as the bee

Because “perceptions” of
“events” differ, the human from that of the bee, for instance, there cannot be
any knowledge of “the thing in itself” – “nur
ein für uns unzugängliches und undefinierbares X”. At the same time, Nietzsche
rejects the very notion of “thing-in-itself” because its “reality” is not
separate from that of its perception (cf. Schopenhauer’s objection to Kantian
antinomies and his ante litteram
Lukacsian notion of “identical subject-object”). Even “relationships” that can
be established between different perceptions can provide only yet another “perspective”
from which to interpret the world, but not a “final, objective” perspective.
All that can be established then - not “proven” or “explained” but merely
“described” - are these “regularities” that can be given numerical expression
in space and time and be exploited instrumentally
by humans. Consequently, these “regularities” are mere “conventions”,
anthropomorphic metaphors or metonymies.

The problem with Nietzsche's "true phenomenology and perspectivism" is precisely that the “regularities and predictions” of scientific mathesis are often so
strong that they go beyond the mere notion of “convention” and "habituation"; that they may be
“arbitrary” in their designation but “necessary”, not in a physical sense but in a socio-political one in that they lie outside the will of some humans, in
their “regularity and predictability”. Nietzsche is simply not dealing with the
fact that it is not our “designation” of each separate “leaf” with the symbol
“leaf” that is the problem: the problem is that this designation is effectual
in the prediction of what a “leaf” will do in different "experimental" situations created by human beings that belong to an antagonistic society . And this is
what constitutes a “political practice”! So Nietzsche simply does not confront yet this
“political practice” as inter-subjectively valid
science! Although he clearly perceives the problem of what
constitutes this validity, of this
“effectuality”, whereby “truth” and “science” may be “un-masked” and
de-mystified, he simply is unable yet to go beyond a rudimentary “conventional”
explanation of scientific practice as more than “persistence” or "habituation" and “self-deception” that have sunk to the level of “necessity” and “instinct”. The question we need to answer next is whether despite these early failures we can find already in this early work the seeds for a more thorough-going critique of social and scientific reality in Nietzsche that can lead us to lay new foundations for the critique of the Christian-bourgeois society of capital.